Government

This Police Department’s DNA Collection Was So Unethical New Laws Will Likely Be Made Preventing It From Happening Again

Treating victims like future violators can’t be good for police-civilian relations.

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ATL_FilmingPolice_610x400Information spillover is a hell of an annoyance. I’m not tech savvy enough to know if it’s because of cookies or my FBI agent leaking intel to Amazon to make ends meet, but at this point, we’ve all experienced a website or person trying to sell us something that knows way more than we initially thought we had let on. Usually the annoyance is purely civil, but things tend to get complicated when the police get involved.

A woman whose rape kit DNA was used to link her to an unrelated property crime has filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco over the incident, which sparked a national outcry earlier this year.

It was revealed in February that the San Francisco police department used the DNA and later dropped the charges against her. Her DNA had been collected and stored in the system as part of a 2016 domestic violence and sexual assault case, the then district attorney, Chesa Boudin, said in February in a shocking revelation that raised privacy concerns.

What?! It doesn’t take the person who CALI’d criminal procedure to get the feeling that something is off about how this evidence was obtained. This cross application of evidence gained from a different context raises privacy concerns.

The revelation prompted a backlash from advocates, law enforcement, legal experts and lawmakers, many of whom warned the practice could affect victims’ willingness to come forward to law enforcement authorities.

“This practice treats victims like evidence, not human beings,” Boudin said at the time. “This is legally and ethically wrong.”

The chilling effects that this practice would pose are obvious. Things are bad enough as is, with estimates of 80% of sexual assaults going unreported.

The simple solution would be to make it so that data collected from rape kits be solely used for the purposes of identifying assailants — California seems to be moving in that direction.

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Woman Whose Rape Kit DNA Was Used Against Her In Separate Crime Sues San Francisco [The Guardian]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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